Wednesday, January 30, 2013

So slow progress this week in general. Both Kawe and myself have been quite busy with some contract work that keeps the doors open and the lights on, but we will hopefully get a bit more done in this next week.M.I.N.T (Mecha, Infantry, and Tactics):
Your favorite tactical wargame with giant mechs and nazi zombies, progressed a small bit this week.

We have a 3D like unit selector implemented with proper layering. This would normally be animated, and likely much taller, or have its height dynamically generated depending on what is moused over.

We also started to mockup some approaches to visibility when behind a building or other object that obscures the view.

One current approach is the following:

A building or other height based object blocking becomes this black translucent state.

The green selection cursor which is tied to mouse movement, could also cause another object to go black if needed. In this way you can clearly see a moused over destination as well as the selected unit.

Gravitum:
Sounds, sounds, and more sounds. SFX integration and tweaking continues on this front.

Level development has been slow, but should hopefully be picking up some momentum, as the level editor has received some feature editions.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Prototyping has started on the isometric engine that will ultimately power the game, and through some pixel shader magic we've been able to restore the long lost ability of our 8bit and 16bit kin to do in-game palette switching.

What does that mean for you?

Well beyond being used to nicely color different player's armies in multi-player with default colors like traditionally done in every RTS and TBS, we are very excited about allowing player created clans to create their own custom clan specific color schemes.

These created color schemes would be available to clan members to use when battling online, and will be visible to other players.

Gravitum:

We received and integrated the finished chip tunes, and are currently in the process of integrating and refining the sound effects for the game.

Also integrated is a new death animation, and more are in the pipeline.

Check out the video below which demonstrates a full level run through of a challenge map, and a sample of the awesome sound track.